


Revisionist History

by Newsy



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Original Character(s), POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 00:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Newsy/pseuds/Newsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can see all of time, what is fixed and what is in flux, and - at this stage in his personal timeline - the Doctor, in his tenth incarnation, views himself as the enforcer of the laws of time rather than their commander.  When Donna Noble and an unwitting visitor fall into a trap set by one who would rather command the laws of time, the Doctor must rescue Donna from her own perceptions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revisionist History

The grating, whining, nails-on-chalkboard noise, had it come from my car, would have spelled disaster or at least costly inconvenience.  I decided I would never quite get used to the fact that the same noise, coming from the Doctor’s fantastic machine, indicated perfect working order.

The wiry man – _was_ he a man?  The wiry man in the pinstriped suit had picked me up who knows how long ago, rescuing me from the clutches of a grotesque creature that appeared to be a walking collection of green phlegm with great beady eyes and a tendency toward flatulence.  A Slitheen, he called it, and I had no reason not to take him at his word.  After all, he seemed to recognize it at first sight, and besides, what else would a beady-eyed flatulent phlegm creature be called?  The impossible man and his impossible ship had taken me to what was apparently an entire _planet_ of slimy habitual wind-breakers, where I apparently served as prosecution exhibit A in the case against the… thing that had nearly captured me.

Now, thankful to be back in the seemingly tiny ship’s cavernous interior, I reveled in the simple pleasures of a shower and clean clothes and phlegm-creature-free surroundings before bracing myself for a look at my watch.  And somehow, less than twenty-four hours had passed since my rescue.  “I can still make it back,” I marveled, mostly to myself.

“Oh, but who’d want to go back?” the Doctor protested.  “After such a brilliant adventure?”

“Brilliant adventure?” I repeated.  “After getting chased down by a giant farting snot-bubble – and thank you, again, many times over – what makes you think I’d find anything _brilliant_ about visiting _more_ giant farting snot-bubbles?”

The Doctor considered this.  “Fair point, yeah,” he conceded before offering a counter-argument.  “But how many humans can say they’ve been to Raxacoricofallapatorian juvenile court?  Can’t wait to pick Donna up – she’ll be jealous of you.”

Donna, presumably the Doctor’s partner and/or sidekick and/or co-pilot based on how often he had mentioned her name in her absence, was away on what he would only call a family visit after what he would only call a rather disturbing trip.  And no, I thought, she probably would _not_ be jealous of my visit to a disgusting planet I could neither spell nor pronounce.  I silently rolled my eyes in the Doctor’s general direction.  He took my reaction as a cue to drop the subject.  “Back where, then?”

“Home,” I hastily said.  “By my watch, I’ve got just about half an hour to get to class.”

The doctor looked insulted that I would leave the thrill of time-space travel and the comfort of the TARDIS for an ordinary school night.  Still, he piloted the ship to a grinding stop a few feet from my driveway, allowing me to barrel into my car and peel out before the TARDIS could finish its peculiar disappearing act.

***

One would think the universe had stopped dead in its tracks to record the moment.  For the first time all semester, the traffic had cooperated, the stoplights had all been green in just the right sequence, all my excuses for late arrival had vanished in front of my eyes, and I was actually early for class.  And on top of that, my position paper wasn’t half bad.  Not by any stretch of the imagination a crowning moment in academia, but not half bad, certainly enough to secure a more-than-passing grade.  Maybe the promise of seeing literal different worlds had given me just the push I needed to craft a cohesive study of couples from figurative different worlds.

I settled into my usual seat near the door, dropped my jacket over the back of the chair, reached into my overfull rucksack and pulled out… the wrong notebook.

Whatever my time in the TARDIS had done for me so far, it certainly hadn’t made me any more organized.

So much for being early.  I scrambled to collect my things and crashed into the hallway in a mild panic.  Looking for a convenient shortcut to the exit, I noticed a double door at the end of the corridor, one which I had never before seen and which almost appeared new.  I disregarded any thought of why I had failed to notice evidence of construction before the sudden appearance of this door and simply stepped through it.

And behind the door was not only an alarming lack of shortcut, but also an alarming lack of university classroom building.

I stood not in a spacious hallway, but in a tight squeeze of an aisle in a cramped record store.  The walls were plastered with album cover art and promotional posters, none of which appeared to have originated from beyond the early 1990s.  The selection fit the time period of the décor, containing at least as many albums on cassette as albums on compact disc.  About a dozen teenagers, most of them trying to look like grunge rockers, trolled the aisles.  From the speakers emanated the familiar thrashing strains of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

“Hi, uh, can I help you?” the cashier, who looked roughly the same age as the clientele, greeted me.

Several possible replies scampered through my mind, all of which would have gotten me shipped to the nearest psychiatric ward.  Where am I?  _When_ am I?  How did I get here?  Why is a grunge-era record store located in the middle of a university campus that otherwise operates in the year 2009?  What are you all going to do with yourselves when you no longer have Kurt Cobain to worship?  Did I look that ridiculous in flannel when I was thirteen?  Has it really been _that_ long since I was thirteen?

“No thanks, just looking,” was the most normal answer I could generate.  And really, it was the truth, mostly; he didn’t need to know I was _just looking_ for someplace nearly two decades in his future.

I tried not to panic.  After all, there was no reason to panic yet.  Nothing weird had happened, other than my showing up in the first place.  And if I’d traveled in time, I told myself in a brief attempt at reason, I certainly hadn’t done it unaided.  Therefore, my inner monologue continued, the only plausible explanation for my apparent temporal leap was that the Doctor and his TARDIS were here.

Less than ten seconds of scanning my surroundings proved me wrong.  If anything could’ve been more out of place in an early-1990s record store than someone from 2009, it would’ve been a vintage police box.  And this shop was fresh out of police boxes.  Now there _was_ reason to panic.

Before my mind could reach full alert, I spotted a bewildered-looking red-haired woman out of the corner of my eye.  Showing no interest in any of the music and no sign of being a chaperone to any of the young shoppers, and wearing strikingly current-to-me clothing, she appeared, if it were possible, just as misplaced in time as I was.

The woman failed to register my presence before noticing an exit door and running toward it in a frenzied rush.  I impulsively followed her, hoping against hope that I was right and she was a fellow time traveler – and that perhaps we would emerge in the familiar hallway at the university.

I was half right.  She was apparently a fellow time traveler.  But behind the door was most certainly _not_ a familiar hallway.

Before me lay a scene enacted in full color that seemed better suited to black-and-white photos and newsreels.  Multitudes of men in nearly identical suits rushed about in a cavernously large, yet claustrophobically crowded, room, shouting at each other and at the world at large among a chaotic whirl of paper and noise.  I watched the flame-haired woman look around in a muted frenzy, apparently scanning the room for another exit.

“What if we come back through this door?” I called in her direction.  The cacophony of bickering and shouting and ticker-tape machines drowned out my voice.  I opened my mouth to try a second time, but the woman had disappeared into the sea of suits.

Aiming at least to return to the inexplicably located record store and perhaps wishing to find the interior of the Doctor’s ship, I turned and followed my own suggestion.  Upon opening the door, though, there was… _nothing._   A blank room, devoid of color and furnishing and illuminated only by a few thin rays of sunlight through a small barred window, stood where just moments before the early 1990s had been.  The only way in or out of the room appeared to be the very doorway in which I stood.

I had no time to curse my foolish decision; if I was to find my way back to familiar surroundings in my home decade, it seemed my best course of action was to find and continue following the red-haired stranger.  In this frantic crowd, though, finding _anyone_ would be a challenge.

Rather than concentrate on the fact that I was surrounded by angry and panicked strangers, I decided to apply all the detective skills I’d ever learned from a steady diet of Hercule Poirot and Kay Scarpetta and – hopefully – discern where and when I was.

The _where_ part was easy enough once I calmed my rattled mind: the ticker-tape machines and the sheer size of the room gave it away as the New York Stock Exchange.  The _when_ part, however, would be more challenging.  Following my instinct that I had somehow landed in a time before color film, I scanned the trading floor several times and managed to spot the red-haired woman.  One last scan of the room confirmed that she and I were the only people of the female persuasion present.  My vague instinct had been right, or at least close to right: no women, I recalled with immediate and frightening self-consciousness, had stepped foot on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor before 1943.  I wondered why, out of an entire undergraduate women’s history course through which I had mostly slept, I remembered this particular fact.

But exactly how far in these traders’ future was 1943?  The best way to answer that in a crowded room full of strangers shouting at each other, I determined, was to listen for something intelligible among the shouting.

The task of picking out words among the bedlam was much easier in the idea stage than in the execution stage.  As I cautiously picked my way through the crowd toward the other woman, I paused several times to eavesdrop on the men immediately surrounding me with little success.  Amazingly, none of the men noticed my presence, even when I brushed against one’s arm.

Only one word emerged, albeit over and over, from the confusing noise: “Sell.”  And a covert peek at one trader’s discarded newspaper revealed why.

The date read _October 29, 1929_ – to be known as Black Tuesday, one of the days that launched the Great Depression.

I finally caught up with the red-haired stranger, who – like I – was wearing the exact same clothing she had sported in the vanishing record store.  “We have to get out of here,” I said without bothering to introduce myself.

“You think?” she scoffed before double-taking and staring at me.  “Who are you?”

Three men turned toward us and pointed.  If there had been time for formalities a moment ago, there certainly was no time now.  “Let’s get out of here first!” I shouted.

I followed the woman to and through the nearest exit, which led to a much smaller space than the cavernous trading floor.  Already, I had come to expect another time and location to appear spontaneously.

“Doctor?” the red-haired woman called.

I almost smiled.  “You too?”

The woman looked indignant.  “I take _three days_ with Gramps and Mum, and he _replaces_ me?”

The fact that this woman also knew the Doctor finally clicked.  “Donna?” I ventured.

“Well, that’s nice,” she grumbled, half under her breath.  “At least he told you _who_ you’re replacing.”

“I’m not replacing you,” I insisted.  “Last I knew, he was on his way to pick you up.”

Donna looked slightly embarrassed and moderated the tone of her voice.  “Who’re you, then?”

I introduced myself just before a disembodied voice came out of a speaker somewhere in our new location.  The unseen man identified himself as Captain Jim MacQuarrie and droned through routine details about a rush-hour delay and a flight originating from London Heathrow and bound for New York.  Donna and I looked around at the somewhat restrictive confines of an airliner that, by its familiar seating configuration, appeared to be in the 747 family.

“I guess we’re flying to New York,” I uneasily chuckled, dropping into a vacant seat.

“We just _came_ from New York,” Donna laughed in reply from the seat directly behind mine.

I looked around the cabin and rather quickly deduced that this flight was not of the present-day variety.  The passengers came prepared for the trip with books and decks of cards, not laptops and BlackBerry-enabled phones.  The accessories, combined with a dose of period fashion, suggested the 1980s.  I attempted to disappear into the fabric of the seat I had claimed; Donna looked around the cabin, perhaps hoping the Doctor and the TARDIS would materialize by the galley.

The pilot’s voice crackled over the speakers again.  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.  We should be departing shortly for New York JFK.  We’ll be flying at a cruising altitude of…”  I only half-listened to the details of the aircraft and the weather in New York, but the number of the flight caught my attention and sent a chill through my body: “…and again, welcome aboard Pan Am Flight 103.”

I sat bolt upright and turned toward Donna, who looked as chilled as I felt.  “Did you –” I started to ask.

“I know,” Donna whispered.  She leaned toward the passenger to her left and asked as casually as possible, “Pardon me, sir, what’s today?”

The passenger, an impeccably dressed middle-aged man, mumbled without looking at Donna, “Twenty-first December.”

“Nineteen eighty…” Donna pressed.

The man arched his eyebrows.  “How many drinks you had?”

“Just answer the question,” Donna snapped.

“Eight,” the man said slowly.  “Nineteen eighty- _eight.”_

Donna and I exchanged a quick glance, and Donna continued talking to the man next to her who had clearly run out of patience with her.  “You’ve got to get off this plane,” she said.  “Something very bad is gonna happen –”

“You don’t even know what year it is, and now you think you’re some sort of psychic?” the man nearly shouted.

“No, listen,” Donna insisted.  “Trust me.  Come with us.”  She stood and made for the exit, with me close behind her.  The man scoffed, shook his head and muttered something about not canceling his Christmas.

As we scrambled past the rest of the passengers, even as we barged past a confused flight attendant, Donna said nothing.  In a fit of impulsivity, I continued straight ahead in the direction of the cockpit.  Donna stopped me with a firm, “Oh, no you don’t.”

“We can’t let them take off!” I protested.  “You know what happens to all these people, the people on the ground –”

Donna held up a hand.  She was still stern, but quieter now.  “And we can’t stop it from happening.  Not on our own.”

“But we’re _here!”_ I argued all the louder.  “You think we need the Doctor to help us cause a scene and get this plane grounded?”

“I think we don’t know what the Doctor knows,” Donna replied somberly.  “He told me once that he can see all of time – the present, the past, what can be, what can’t be, all over the universe.  He said, ‘Some things are fixed, some things are in flux.’  Don’t ask me,” she countered my bewildered stare.  “I don’t know how that’s possible, seeing everything at once.  But he knows when it’s right to change something – to save a person or a flight or a whole planet.”

“And you believe him?” I snapped.

“Yes!” Donna bit back with no hesitation.  “Well…” she quickly followed.  “Most of the time.  Sometimes.  And sometimes is enough to know we can’t change the future without him, and stopping this flight _does_ change the future.”  She grabbed my forearm and pulled me through the exit just before the still bewildered-looking flight attendant latched it shut for the final time.  “Now, come on.  You can’t be on this flight – I don’t even know if you’ve been born yet, ginge.”

“I’m nine when this happens,” I gasped, struggling to keep up with the faster and fitter Donna.  “And the ginger’s from a bottle at my hairdresser’s.  Thanks, though.”  I waved at Donna to stop once we were safely through the gate.

“Sorry,” Donna laughed.  “The Doctor – best aerobics instructor to never teach a class.”  She quickly became serious again.  “All those people, worried about canceling Christmas or missing work… they’ve got no idea.”

“Donna –” I tried to interrupt.

She continued, looking forlornly in the direction in which the plane would take off.  “Just because we can’t change the future by ourselves, doesn’t mean I can’t wish –”

“Donna, _I’ve_ got no idea _where we are,”_ I said with a firmness that surprised me.  She fell silent and turned toward a complex of apartment buildings, teeming with frightened-looking people and buzzing with frantic conversations.

“Of course,” Donna mused.  “We went through a door.”

She froze, then gripped my shoulders and turned me in the direction of a collection of banners bearing the Olympic rings.  Among the mass of humanity were a few, surprisingly few, men in uniforms emblazoned with the word _Polizei._

I shuddered.  “Donna… we’re in Munich.”

Some of the conversations around us became more distinct.  Everyone in the panicked crowd, thanks to the universal translation effect of having been aboard the Doctor’s ship, spoke in accented English – and all spoke in vague terms of trouble in a single apartment building in what was apparently the Olympic Village: 31 Connollystrasse.

“We’re in Munich,” Donna breathed, “at the start of the massacre.”

“We have to get out of here,” I whispered in reply.

Donna nodded in agreement and gently questioned me, “What happened to trying to change the future?”

“Someone talked some sense into me,” I said with a sad smile.  “Now which way is out?”

With a rather Doctor-like and out-of-place grin, Donna answered, “Just find a door.  How about…”  She pointed toward another apartment building, her idea of a safe distance away from the scene of the attack on the Israeli delegation.  “That one.”

Someone called to us; to our surprise, it was not a police officer, but an athlete.  “Where are you going?” she shouted.  “There has been gunfire, we are hearing of hostages – the village is not safe for spectators.  For your own safety, you must leave!”

Donna looked earnestly at the young woman.  “We are,” she said.  She turned to me and nodded, and we slipped through the building’s front entrance.

Each door so far had brought me – _us;_ Donna had been my unwitting companion, or I hers, presumably for every step of the disjointed journey – into disaster, mild or severe.  Having traveled from the benign fashion disaster that was the early 1990s, to the financial disaster of Black Tuesday, to the great tragedies of Lockerbie and Munich, we hardly expected ourselves to have emerged in a stunning foyer of an opulent mansion.  Yet there we were: marble floors, delicately carved hardwood trim with golden embellishments, the largest chandelier I had ever seen in person, and a wide, ruby-red-carpeted staircase straight out of a movie about the royals.

My eyes wandered around the glorious, quiet, altogether empty hall and took in the ostentatiousness in low-level shock.  Donna, though, kept her eyes fixed on one spot – the top of the staircase.

“Lee?” she gasped.  A long pause.  “I thought I’d… you were… God, Lee, you’re real!”  She rushed to the top of the stairs and threw her arms around… nothing.  “You’re real… and you’re perfect.”

As far as I could tell, Donna was speaking to thin air.  But still she continued speaking.  “Is all this _yours?”_ she marveled, a look of amazement on her face.  Amazement silently grew into a sort of stunned joy, and tears formed in her eyes.  “You really – I mean yes!  Of course, yes!”  Donna extended her hand as if to accept a ring, which never appeared, though she stared at her hand with an enthralled smile.  She embraced the invisible ring’s invisible presenter with a passionate kiss.

As funny as the scene could have been, it was at least ten times more disturbing.  I backed away and only then noticed the top of a descending spiral staircase – _who knows,_ I thought, _the way things have gone today, it may have only just decided to show up._   “Donna?” I called as calmly as I could.  “Donna, we should go… the Doctor…”  I raised my voice.  “Donna!”

Still clinging to her invisible man, Donna failed to hear me.  I gave up and clambered down the seemingly endless spiral staircase, barely pausing to catch my breath at the few landings on the way to what I hoped would be an exit.  It seemed useless by now to hope for the TARDIS to appear behind the next door; if it had yet to appear, after all, what would make this illusory place special enough to attract it?

And yet, behind what looked like a nondescript rear door at the end of the staircase, there stood the Doctor’s ship, incongruously parked in an unfinished concrete-walled basement, its own door ajar as though a visitor was expected.  I rushed to the doorway and froze there in shock, running my hands along the frame and blinking several times to be sure the interior would not disappear.

The Doctor, on the other hand, seemed patently unsurprised at first.  “About time,” he casually said without looking at me.  “You can only stay in Chiswick so long, hey?”  He finally looked up, flashing an eager smile that faded into a bewildered stare.  “What?”

“I found Donna,” I gasped.

“I didn’t know she was lost,” the Doctor said questioningly.

“She’s upstairs,” I said breathlessly, skipping the rest of the explanation.

The Doctor’s bewildered stare became more bewildered.  “I suppose that means we’re _downstairs,_ then?”

“You have to help her!” I shouted.

“The question is,” the Doctor continued, pressing what appeared to me to be random buttons on the TARDIS’ central console, “how did we _get_ downstairs?”

“I don’t care!” I shouted all the louder.  “We’ve been chasing our own tails through time for who knows how long, and we ended up here, and Donna’s gotten engaged to some perfect man I can’t even _see!”_

The Doctor fixed me with an intense glare.  “Did Mr. Perfection have a name?”

I nodded.  “Lee.”

“Let’s get upstairs,” the Doctor urged me, grabbing my arm as he vaulted out the still open door of the TARDIS and leading me up the spiral staircase.  Before I could ask the significance of the invisible man’s name, he continued pressing me.  “You never answered me – how did we get downstairs?”

I gasped for breath and tried to keep up with the Doctor’s frantic pace up the stairs.  “No idea how _you_ got downstairs.  I went through a bunch of – of doors, and nowhere I went made sense – the New York Stock Exchange, Black Tuesday, if you can believe that –”

“I can believe anything,” the Doctor paused to admonish me.  “Time Lord, remember?”

“The Munich Olympics,” I continued, “and I saw Donna _everywhere,_ and – then we ended up in this house –”

“With this many stairs, this is hardly a house,” the Doctor interrupted again.  “A manor house, maybe, but not just a plain house.”  He abruptly stopped on a stair, nearly causing me to crash into him.  “What am I thinking?  You’re the one who’s been here before.  Lead the way.”

I gulped and stepped in front of the Doctor, wondering at his confidence in me, and we continued up the stairs until they finally, mercifully ran out.  I stood perplexed at the sight in front of me: not the grand foyer I had seen upon first entering the mansion, but instead an ordinary set of double doors.

“These – these weren’t here,” I stammered weakly.

“It’s part of a trap, then,” the Doctor said with an out-of-place grin.  “Brilliant!”  After pulling and pushing and finding the doors locked, he pulled his sonic screwdriver from his pocket and aimed it at the locking mechanism.  _“Allons-y!”_

With a whir and a buzz and a flash of blue light, the Doctor’s sonic device encouraged the doors to open, revealing a dimly lit room nearly devoid of furnishing.  A single table and two chairs stood in the center of the room under a single swinging light bulb, an odd-looking typewriter sat on the edge of the table, and wires too numerous to count stretched from the back of the typewriter and snaked across the floor into the darkness.  A pale, wiry little man, with a shock of white hair that contrasted with his youthful face, sat hunched over the keys.  And behind him stood Donna, ignoring our presence and staring off to the side with a lovestruck smile.

“Donna…” the Doctor cautiously said.

“Why disturb her?” the man at the typewriter intoned in a surprisingly even and quiet voice.  “You wish your companion happiness, do you not?”

The Doctor ignored the white-haired man.  “Donna, just look.  Really _look,”_ he said more firmly.  Still she seemed oblivious to the Doctor’s words and even to our presence in the room.

The white-haired man chuckled almost to himself.  “Don’t you see, Doctor?” he asked; I wondered at his knowledge of the Doctor’s name without benefit of introduction.  “This is her wish – how her story should end, how her life should be.”

“And you’d know,” the Doctor retorted with a sarcastic edge to his voice, “because you’re in charge of her life.”

“She left me in charge,” the strange man replied, still disturbingly cool and unruffled.  “She came to me willingly –”

“Because she didn’t know she was coming to _you!”_ the Doctor interrupted, showing the first temper either man had demonstrated.  I moved slightly behind the Doctor, hoping against hope that his rail-thin frame would provide me some protection from this apparently dangerous opponent.

The other man laughed lightly again.  “Why waste our time on meaningless details, Doctor?”

“How does he know you?” I whispered at the man’s second use of the Doctor’s name.

“We’ve met before,” the Doctor said simply before addressing Donna again.  “Look around you, Donna, look really carefully.  There’s no Lee, there’s no one next to you at all, there’s no one else in this room except you and me and my friend here… and a brat,” he nearly spat in the nameless man’s direction.  “A lonely, powerful brat.”

“So you’ve met before,” I whispered.  “Who is he?”

“The Revisionist,” the Doctor replied, all the while looking disdainfully at the man’s typewriter.  “A name he chose himself – thought human names weren’t distinctive enough for someone in his position.”

“And his position is what, exactly?” I asked.  I edged out from behind the Doctor and toward the still unaware Donna, perhaps hoping a simple yank on the arm would succeed where words had failed.  The Doctor caught me before I took three steps and stopped me with a cautionary shake of the head.

“Time Agent.”  The Doctor activated his sonic screwdriver again, pointing it at the wires, the typewriter, the light bulb.  “Recruited to remove _rogue elements_ from history.”  The Doctor’s tone made clear the disregard he held for missions of interference.  “This one went too far even for the Time Agency.  They stripped him of his commission.”  He tossed the screwdriver from hand to hand in a casual stance.  “But not of his memory – and he’s brilliant, a genius.  He’s been using the Agency’s technology to rewrite history, the history of dozens of planets, to his own specifications.  Picks a mark, someone who wishes things had gone differently, gives them their wish.”  The Doctor looked vaguely reflective.  “Next time a Time Agent stepped out of line, he lost a couple years’ worth of knowledge.”

The notion of history being rewritten gave me pause.  “But all of those places we went – none of them changed,” I protested.  “How can he be rewriting Earth’s history if all those things still happened?”

The Doctor smiled at me and nodded toward Donna.  “He picked the wrong marks.”

“But Donna’s –”

“He’s changed his plan of attack.  She won’t change the planet’s history, so he makes her change her own.”

“Why not just pick somebody else?”

The Doctor shook his head.  “Haven’t worked that out yet.  He’s not known for changing _people’s_ history, just _planets’._   Donna’s… massively important somehow.  She must be – I ran into her twice.”

I ignored the Doctor’s last comment as simply too strange to question.  “But I saw everything else she did.  Why not now? And why did I get out?”

“At a guess?”  The Doctor turned toward the Revisionist pointedly.  “You’re wise to him, even without knowing you are.  If there’s a dark side to a place or a person, I’d wager you’re the first to see it.  Depressing, that,” he admitted, facing me again.  “But quite useful too.  You see it, you recognize it, you run from it – you survive.”

Emboldened, I looked at the Revisionist myself, still addressing my words to the Doctor.  “This Revisionist must not be all that powerful after all, then, if all it takes to beat him is knowing what’s real.”

“You’d be surprised,” the Doctor chastised me.  “Look at Donna.  Now she’s _fantastic,_ learned well enough from me how dangerous it is to change history, learned well enough from me to teach _you_ – but… at the end of the day, optimistic to a fault.  Sees a light, doesn’t like to think it might be a train coming.”  He squinted at the unquantifiable mass of wires emerging from the Revisionist’s typewriter.  “She hides the dark.”

“So,” I asked, “how do we _un-_ hide it?”

“Oh, now that’s easy enough,” the Doctor said, a note of triumph slipping into his voice.  “Just turn on the lights!”  He grasped a single wire from the tangled mess, gave it a sharp tug and cheekily waved the disconnected end in front of my face.  “Time Agent tech.  Like child’s play.  Well, if you can pilot a TARDIS.”

Donna gasped and stumbled backward.  “Lee!” she shouted.  _“Lee!_   Where are you?”

“Donna –” the Doctor began to say.

Donna spun to face him.  “What did you do to him?” she demanded.

“Donna Noble,” the Revisionist addressed her in an almost hypnotic fashion.  “Or Donna McAvoy, if you choose.”  The small man stepped in front of Donna and took her face in his hands.  “I can bring him back.  If you choose… I can bring him back.”

“Donna, don’t listen to him,” the Doctor shouted, striding toward the pair and grasping Donna’s shoulder.  “Listen to _me.”_

Donna, her face still pointed squarely at the Revisionist’s, hesitantly shifted her eyes toward the Doctor.  “But Doctor, he can bring him back,” she pleaded.  “You heard him.  He can bring him back.”

“He was never really here, Donna,” the Doctor whispered.  “He was never anywhere but your mind, your memories.”

Donna’s eyes widened and brimmed with tears.  “But _he was right here,”_ she insisted.

“Trust me,” said the Doctor.  “Look down.  Just look.”

Donna glanced at the floor and shuddered as though she were seeing the haphazard collection of wires for the first time.  She turned her gaze to the Revisionist and forcefully pulled his hands from her face, but said nothing, looking at once profoundly sorrowful, angry and terrified.

“You have two choices,” the Doctor sternly addressed the Revisionist, protectively pulling Donna away from him.  “Stop rewriting histories, right here and now… or the Time Agency will find you.”  He ushered Donna and me toward the safety of the TARDIS.  “And I won’t have to do a thing.  You’re a _rogue element.”_

The Revisionist said nothing as the Doctor stared him down from the doorway.  He only offered a weak smile and resumed his place at his typewriter.

The instant the door of the TARDIS swung closed, Donna swatted the Doctor hard on the arm.  “The next time I want to have an _innocent visit_ with Gramps,” she shouted, _“don’t_ let me!”

“You’re quite welcome,” the Doctor chuckled, tucking Donna under the same arm she had just pounded.  He nodded toward me and quipped, “I’d introduce you, but it seems you’ve met.”

“You could say that, yeah,” Donna laughed halfheartedly, still appearing shaken.

Several seconds of silence ticked by before I questioned the Doctor, who was by then leaning back in his seat with his feet propped up on the TARDIS’ console.  “What just happened?”

“We won,” the Doctor answered nonchalantly.

I couldn’t help chuckling even as I rolled my eyes.  “Before that.”

The Doctor knitted his eyebrows in a puzzled expression.  “You were there.”

“Don’t ask for details.  He’ll go on for weeks,” said Donna, earning a comical glare from the Doctor and an appreciative laugh from me.

The Doctor whirled around to face the controls of the TARDIS.  “So… where to next?  I was thinking Florana.  Beautiful place, Florana.  Golden beaches, seas like warm milk.”  Neither Donna nor I said a word.  The Doctor interpreted the silence as a cue to try again.  “What about Scanadia?  Real snow!  Nothing like a winter planet, right, Donna?”  Donna scoffed as though she had experience with winter planets.  “Or… oh!  Midnight!” the Doctor tried yet again.  “Made of diamonds.  A whole planet made of diamonds.”  He looked directly at me.  “And don’t tell me somewhere ordinary.  You see what happens when the TARDIS goes somewhere ordinary.  _Ordinary_ goes –” the Doctor whistled and waved a hand away from himself – “right out the window.”

“I noticed,” I awkwardly replied, backing slowly toward the door.

The Doctor stepped away from the console and approached me with a look of great earnestness.  “And that’s why you have to choose,” he said.  “You’re with me, it’s always moving on.  There’s no room for your perfectly planned chronological life.  A visit home now and then, a few mobile phone upgrades so they know you’re not dead – that’s all.”

I paused before answering.  “It’s you… or everything else.”

The Doctor nodded slightly, with a quirky, sad half-smile flashing across his face for a split second.  Slowly I gazed around the interior of the machine about which I knew almost nothing, but which, if I chose, could be my home.  I took note of the beautiful, twisting columns of the living building material that the Doctor had called coral – it looked nothing like the coral of oceanic reefs, but then again, coral was so much more direct than “living building material.”  Among the stories-tall columns I noticed doorways I had not seen before, leading to halls and rooms I had not known existed.

Upon drinking in the sheer scale of the ship, I came to the conclusion that it was too large to feel like home.  And upon seeing Donna, so comfortable in the TARDIS and so content with the Doctor, I came to a second conclusion: no matter how much bigger it was on the inside, this camouflaged shuttle through time and relative dimensions in space was full.

I tried to look the Doctor in the eye but found my gaze drawn to the floor, unable to find the words to tell him that I had chosen my ordinary everything else.  No words were needed.  “Right then,” the Doctor said, spinning on his heels and blindly pulling a random lever on the jumbled collection of controls that made the TARDIS work.  The ship lurched wildly in several directions at once, signaling our departure from the dim confines that housed the Revisionist’s imaginary world.  I grabbed the edge of the console in a vain attempt to keep my balance.  The Doctor, still twiddling and tweaking controls with one hand, flung the other hand in my direction and caught me before the TARDIS lurched me straight into the floor.

“Thank you,” I said, finally steadying myself as the ship at last decided to move in only one direction.  “And not just for that.”

The Doctor smiled and mussed my hair as one would do to a young child – although, I suppose, I _would_ have been a young child to a being who proudly claimed to be over nine hundred years old.  “Few more years, you won’t care about the gray,” he teased.

The TARDIS lurched and thumped again, indicating a landing.  Donna flung the door open and turned to the Doctor in abject shock.

“What?” the Doctor innocently asked.

Donna’s mouth dropped as wide open as the door of the TARDIS.  “You – it – we landed in the right place?”

The Doctor beamed.  “And?”

I leaned toward Donna and muttered, “Why are you acting like that’s a surprise?”

“Welcome back to 2009,” the Doctor shouted over the end of my question.  “Five minutes to class.  Chop chop.  Oh, and you’ll be needing this.”  He flung a notebook in my direction.  To my pleasant bewilderment, it was the one that had been embarrassingly absent from my rucksack.  “Bag’s where you left it, car’s where you left it – and if anybody asks, car’s where you left that.”

Lost for words, I nodded and waved at the odd man in the suit and trainers.  Leaning against the console, he casually saluted me in return.  “Go be amazing,” Donna gushed, gently shoving me out the door.

I turned to see the TARDIS phasing in and out of existence before my eyes.  Watching the machine disappear and listening to the grating, whining, nails-on-chalkboard noise fade, I wondered whether it had ever been there at all.

I looked down at the notebook in my hand and observed a page near the back marked with a fold.  Turning inquisitively to it, I found a notation in unfamiliar handwriting: _5 May 2012._

Whatever it meant, I was convinced, at least for the moment.  The impossible man and his impossible ship were real.  Confounding, bizarre, dangerous, utterly wonderful and real.


End file.
